Drinking
Saturday 4:29 PM
Ikebukuro, Tokyo
June 13, 2015
Disclaimer: Please drink responsibly
The large sign wooden sign bolted above the doorway of Russia Sushi was splashed with black ink- spelling of the name of the sushi bar. I peered inside. There were a ton of people inside, noisy and raucous. Not exactly the sort of place where you wanted to sit down and have a drink to yourself.
I wondered what I had been thinking, coming here.
"Yukiko-chan!" There was a voice- a familiar one. I knew exactly what was going to happen- and how to avoid it! I darted forward- trying to escape- but it was no use. A pair of arms clinched tight around me and with a yell of surprise I was lifted into the air.
"Russian!" Oh no no no no no no! "Suuuuuplex!"
A crack resounded, and my shoulders and neck hit the ground, hard. The force of impact spread from my neck down my body, and I groaned in pain, slipping out of her grasp to topple slowly onto the ground.
"And Sasha takes home the world trophy again for Mother Russia!" A slavic looking girl with pale skin and black hair crowd as she held her arms up in victory above me.
I merely groaned.
"Sasha, stop manhandling the customers!" A heavily tinted voice called out in Japanese from within the store. "What what your father say if he knew he was doing this?"
Sasha said something nasty sounding in Russian and then muttered under her breath in Japanese. "He'd say that it's just fun roughhousing and that you're way too strict uncle Simon."
"Besides, you don't mind do you, Yukiko-chan?" She turned an eye to me, and upon the realization that I was still within her arms reach, I hastily responded in the negative by shaking my head.
"No, no, I don't mind at all!" I lied.
"Yeah, that's right, you don't mind." Sasha nodded, to who I didn't know. To herself maybe? "Still... you should probably go in already."
She shooed me through the door, and I went in. Behind the counter was a large burly black man dressed in a sushi chef's outfit. He smiled at me. I smiled back at Simon, the cook. Apparently he was an old friend of Sasha's father and had taken over the restaurant from him after he had retired.
"Ah, Himegawa-san." He said in badly accented Japanese and nodded at me. "What will you have?"
"Uh, I guess I'll start with a mixed Makizushi bento." I ordered while looking up at the menu above the countertop. "And, some cold sake."
"It'll be up in a second. Take a seat."
There were two choices of seats at Russia Sushi. One: in a booth that could seat up to eight people and partitioned off from the rest of the restaurant by a cloth barrier. The second: at the counter, up in one of the bar stools. I opted for the latter and climbed up onto a stool as Simon slide over a bottle of cold Sake over to me. The Makizushi would take some time to prepare and would come later.
"Yo. Himegawa." My neighbor to the right greeted me, and I looked over. It took me a bit to recognize who had called me out, but when I did I was fairly surprised.
"Von Illianburg?" I probed. She certainly didn't look like the mad scientist I knew. Von Illianburg was semi-famous in Tokyo circles- she was one of those back alley Tokyo doctors who also happened to operate on magical girls because she was one herself. Supposedly a German immigrant to Tokyo she was primarily known for her bombastic manner and fantastic wild aristocrat scientist appearance.
The girl in front of me certainly didn't look anything like that. No spikey hair- her blonde hair was down loose to her shoulders, nothing on but a casual set of slacks and shirt plus jacket- no lab coat anywhere in sight, and she looked unusually calm... which was probably due to the bottle of pale lager clutched in her right hand. The brewery was Bitburger; I didn't recognize it.
"Aye." The girl nodded- confirming my suspicions that she was indeed the famed mad scientist. "Don't recognize me like this, do you?"
"...no." I admitted. "Not at all. This doesn't look like your normal appearance at all."
She smiled wryly. "Could it be that this is my normal appearance and what I do usually is just an act I put up?" Before I could ponder the question, she continued. "Yeah, it's not like normal at all. I had a bad day today- and I decided to let my hair down and relax a bit."
"Mmm." I commiserated a little. Bad days were something I knew pretty well. "How was it?"
"A girl was on my operating table today." She took a swig of her drink and looked down at the countertop. "Her friend took her in- and she was in extreme shock. I kept telling her to stay with me the whole time, and her friend kept feeding her grief cubes to stop the depression from setting in."
It sounded like a good story to m-
"She didn't make it. Law of cycles took her right before I could finish stitching her up." Von Illianburg laughed bitterly. "Didn't even leave a body. Just a mess of blood on my sheets."
...that was rough. I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just took the bentou of Makizushi when it arrived and started eating. It was mostly Futomaki with a variety of fillings inside and a bit of Hosomaki placed around the sides. It was pretty good despite the oddity of the ingredients used. I dug in in silence. The cold sake complimented the sushi well. The- well, I was no food critic so I probably shouldn't try to describe it with my inadequate grasp of language.
It was good, was what I was saying.
"So, what's up with you?" Von Illianburg flicked some leftover rice off her chopsticks and pointed them at me. "Why're you so down?"
I paused. Was this an open invitation to a real conversation with the famous Von Illianburg? "Someone reminded me of something. Some people I lost."
"Ah, a conflict between cliques?" Von Illianburg nodded- but she was wrong. It wasn't just another clique conflict. The four clans of Kyoto couldn't just be described as another clique. "Yeah, I see a lot of those."
"Cliques fights don't get people killed." I tried not to snap in irritation. If this was just another clique conflict, my friends would still be with me. No- what had happened to them was a ruthless extermination. "Across all of Tokyo per year, ten girls tops die because of conflicts between cliques. Girls don't smash gems. This wasn't a clique fight."
"They don't smash gems, right?" Von Illianburg smiled in a odd sad little way. "Just because gems aren't smashed doesn't mean girls don't die."
I blinked at her. What was she getting at here? She was a doctor who operated on bodies- she should have known better than anyone the specifics behind the lack of connection between vital functions and the actual body.
"What do you think happens to all those girls who lose out on fights?" Von Illianburg posed a question. "They lose out on territory fights and are driven away slinking into the darkness. What do you think happens to them after that?"
"They slink away into the darkness to find another territory." I replied. "It's not like there's exactly a lack of them."
"That's what you'd expect a sensible functioning magical girl to do, isn't it?" Von Illianburg leaned in as if imparting some sort of great secret. "Except they're not exactly sensible functioning magical girls are they? They're broken bloody and filled with grief aren't they?"
...I had never thought of it that way.
"I'll tell you what they do. They sit around. Filled with worthlessness. They slow their hunting and stop after they're beaten. And then what?" Von Illianburg waved her hands in the air like a butterfly flapping its two wings. "Poof. The law of cycles takes them. I've seen it more times than I've had to."
It wasn't the same, though. "It's not the same, though. Those are fights-"
"Over what?" Illianburg wondered. "Territory? Maybe prestige. All those things that normal magical girl cliques fight over? The only difference here is that the killing happened sooner rather than later."
I fell silent. Was that all I had lost my friends over- a simple fight over territory or prestige? Where they just another casualty in the long line of conflicts between magical girls?
Was this the fate of all magical girls? What a sad way to die. If the wraiths didn't do you in- another girl would. So much for solidarity between the saviors of humanity. So much for saving the universe.
"Yeah- no one thinks of it that way do they?" Von Illianburg leaned back, and cracked open a fresh bottle of pale lager. "As long as they don't see the killing done in front of their eyes- it doesn't happen."
And I too, had fallen to that same very trap. Perhaps I had grown too complacent in my position of a comfortable job and friends. I sat back and stared up at the ceiling. I had prided myself on never killing anyone- none of us had. But how many had we driven to self destruction through our actions. How many deaths had we inadvertently caused.
"Hey- you ever heard of Psychopomp?"
No reaction. I looked over. Von Illianburg was giving me a somewhat piercing stare. "Are you wondering about something?"
"Yeah." I said. "I'm wondering how much blood I have on my hands."
Illianburg paused for a moment, and then sighed. It was low and breathy, tinted with a bit of realization. "I guess I laid some heavy stuff on you, didn't I? And you came over here to unwind too?"
She barked a short laugh. It was kind of depressing and there was a bit of self loathing mixed into it. "See, this is why I never let my hair down. The act keeps me happy- keeps everyone around me happy. When I take a break from it- everyone just gets depressed."
There was a break. She was digging through her memory, most likely. I waited for her answer. I really did want to know.
"You're good. I've never heard of anyone who bit the dust because of anything you or associates did." She tilted back in her chair. "So probably no worse than any other."
"Yeah." I stared forwards and felt a bit of regret for not caring more in the past. At the time though, I was just a dumb kid, filled with ideas and who made decisions that I would later come to regret. Nowadays it seemed like that was all I did. Regret.
I slammed back the rest of the sake and called for more.
At least I wouldn't regret the hangover (because there wouldn't be any).
=][=
Thursday 8:23 AM
Ikebukuro, Tokyo
June 28, 2015
The phone was ringing. Annoying. I reached out through my covers and snatched it up. The number... Nananko-sempai? What was she doing calling then early in the morning?
Well, if she was calling, I suppose that I should answer, right? I slide down on the touchscreen to receive her call. "Hello?"
"Yukiko." Sharp and brisk. This wasn't like the usual Nanako at all. "Tsukasa's been attacked."
"What?" I sat up almost immediately. What?
"An attack last night. We're lucky someone checked up on her today- otherwise we probably wouldn't have found anything but an empty apartment."
Oh. Oh no. No. I shook my head. What the fuck. "Is she alright?! Did-"
"She's alive, critical condition but we've got her being worked on, and we're feeding her grief cubes right now." Nanako's immediate reply was reassuring and probably meant to be soothing but I didn't feel any calmer at all. "The net's howling for blood- but at the moment, everything's more or less under control."
Tsukasa- the net-a thought popped into my head. A responsibility I had passed off to her. If they were... "Tsukasa was mentoring some girls- did you find anything about them? Where they involved?"
"Girls who...?" There was some shuffling in the back and a pause as Nanako spoke to someone. I waited impatiently until she came back to the conversation. "Yeah. Two of them with her. They were attacked it looked like- they left Tsukasa for dead and bagged the girls and ran."
...two rookie girls taken. A friend almost dead. And an internet in uproar. And absolutely no idea who was behind this mess.
This was the worst way to make up to a Thursday morning ever.
Absolute.
Worst.
Immediate Reactions?
[ ] The scene of the crime. Scope it out.
[ ] Visit Tsukasa. I need to be there for her.
[ ] The net. It can't be allowed to boil over.
[ ]
An information dealer to shake down. Literally a suicide option unless you can come up with a viable way to restrain or bypass Shizuka.
[ ] Write in.
Notes: @Avalanche introduced me to Fargo and then this update was delayed for 3 days. Also prologue is over with, welcome to Arc 1!